Monday, November 19, 2018

Exploring Fictional London

Authorial London is an interactive map of references to London locations which can be found in the works and biographies of the writers who have lived there. The map allows you to explore the places where authors lived in London and the locations which they wrote about.

The map uses different colored markers to show London locations where the featured writers lived & worked (yellow) and the places that featured in their works of literature (red). This enables you to compare on the same map the locations where an author lived with the places that they wrote about. So, for example, if you select to view the London locations of Charles Dickens you can see that he lived mostly in west London but wrote mainly about poorer locations in the south and the east of the city.

You can also select to view the works and biographies of individual writers on the map. Alternatively you can select more than one writer to view where their lives or the places that they wrote about converged in London. You can also select to view all the instances where writers have written about the same location. Select 'Places' from the map sidebar and you can then choose individual London neighborhoods to view all the times that the neighborhood has featured in the literature of London.